I have no thesis or anything...I'm just super suspicious of Tom Westfall
byu/fcsuper inQuantumLeap
My personal glimpse into the first half of the 21st Century for some yet to be known future
Deep thought of the day: Golf is basically two marginally related minigames thrown together. A bit like if football required a round of Lawn Bowling once the ball enters the goal area.
In the past, I fairly consistently made frequent check-ins as posts to Facebook for places I visited. However, it seems Facebook is increasingly deprecating this functionality. You can still check-in quite easily, but old check-in posts are breaking. The issue seems to be getting worse over time.
Facebook was very reliable at one point. You could look back through your timeline to see what you did, where you did it, and when you did it. There was even UI that made it easy to choose a time period to peruse. This was useful for so many reasons, not the least of which is planning for further activities in places you already visited, or providing information to others who planned to visit those places. Let's also no forget the value of being able to stroll down memory lane.
Here's an example of one such broken check-in. It's a post in 2012 that simply says "Surprisingly good and unusual". The information about where this check-in took place, including the town and other general information has been completely removed.
The purpose of this blog has changed a bit over the years since Feb 2002. Early on, I was fascinated by the idea of having an online outlet. At the beginning, there are literal log entries about what was actually going on in my daily life. After while, I started covering news items and provided my opinions about stuff. All the while, there was some self-reflection as well. I also started a few other blogs that were more focused, including the exploration of alien life, poetry and even my car.
All of these other blogs have since been retired. I took postings from those and placed them on this blog. All but the poetry blog have been deleted. In fact, around the time I closed down those other blogs, my interest in maintaining a blog waned. During some of the biggest changes in my life is when I posted the least.
Then I started using Instagram. All of a sudden, it was much easier to post about my daily life again, but in a much different way...in the form of images. Instagram and IFTTT combined allowed me to post every IG image directly onto my blog automatically. The number of posts increased 10 fold. I prolly posted text based entries even less than before while I flooded my site with stylized photos. This continued for several years until IG locked down its API...and then even a bit after that until my other methods of automatically uploading IG posts vanished.
I still post on IG frequently. Now, to get IG photos on my blog, I actually have to manually add the posts with those photos. This has actually caused me to post less frequently on IG. Often, when I transfer the photos, I'll combine related images into a single post on this blog.
In addition to IG, I posted my review of scientific papers about the likelihood of life outside of Earth within our Galaxy. These posts were very popular and still attract a lot of attention. However, my two most popular posts (that still top my list of activity for this blog)? Beeper Codes and the related Pager Codes. There's a lot of nostalgia about these codes for some reason.
I'm not writing this post for contemporary consideration. I absolutely know that this information will not interest anyone today. But, this ties back to my first sentence above. The current purpose of this blog, and the one that will stand for here and on? A while back, I realized I have recorded a snapshot of almost the entire 21th Century to date. If I keep this blog going (assuming Google continues to support Blogspot), this blog will represent almost the entirety of the first half of the 21th Century. Nature allowing, I'll try to keep posting until 2052 for a full fifty years. Although my life may not be very interesting to contemporaries, it may be more interesting as this Century becomes ancient history. 300 years from now, this blog may still be available in some manner within whatever form the Internet will take. Maybe electronic archeologists will discover my musings buried in archives. Or, if the world purges the old in such an electronic realm, then this blog or portions thereof may be discovered on some derelict server by dirt-digging archeologists of the 24th Century. Either way, this is my experience for you. Yup...you, Magnolia, et al.
I know the likelihood of the images being kept intact with this blog for a long time are not great, given how Google and other services store them. I know the likelihood that videos being kept intact are even slimmer. Here's to hope that somehow forces beyond my control will allow most (all) of this blog to be preserved as a glimpse into the early years of the Information Age.
I thought of writing about Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken because many (most?) people misinterpret it. Well, Today I Found Out covered the topic so well, there's no sense in my writing about the poem's meaning. Please enjoy their video:
Allie and I were lucky to be able to visit Sydney, Australia late last year. Even still, the Australian fires, which kicked off this crappy year in late 2019 and early 2020, were already starting to consume large regions. The fires got much worse after we returned home from our vacation.
Allie did get a chance to visit family in Asia in February. She was very lucky to get back home before things got covid-crazy. Since then, we've been keeping mostly to ourselves. Multiple plans to spend time with friends and family were cancelled. We have no plan to meet other people until covid-time is over.
That's not to say we've been hiding indoors as shut-ins. Face masks and copious amounts of the appropriate hand sanitizer are always ready for our visits to the store and other necessary locations. I've also been working from home almost 100% of the time, only going into the office (after site approval) a couple of times to access specific stuff on my work desktop computer or paperwork at my desk.
I am weary of the need to keep vigilant against the nasty virus. However, out of love for my neighbor (and of course, family members), my resolve is not weakened.
Month | Event |
---|---|
January | Australia fires |
February | Africa locust plague begins |
March | COVID-SARS-2 explodes |
April | Relatively minor events |
May | George Floyd's horrific murder |
June | Worldwide protests about George Floyd's murder |
July | Multiple natural disasters in Asia |
August | Beirut explosion |
September | Western US fires |
October | Terror attacks in France |
November | Massive COVID-SARS-2 resurgence |
December | Arecibo Observatory collapse |
January 2021 | Riot on Capitol Hill |